Digimon World 3 PSF help by MusashiAA at 10:04 AM EDT on March 15, 2016
Hi.
First of all, I tried to wrap my head around ripping the PSF set for Digimon World 3, since it's not present on this or any archive. Digging inside the game didn't lead me into any relevant music data, which I suspect is the reason why the set doesn't exist in the first place...until I conveniently stumbled upon a guy on a different forum who had very recently managed to rip and upload the music data from the game.
According to him, each track has its own folder, with each folder containing two .bin files: one holds the sequence data, and the other holds the sample data the sequence refers to. I tried to use VGMToolbox to extract the SEQ/VH/VB files from them, but it can't seem to find the .vb files in neither of the two .bin files. I tried to manually extract the .vb files, but the process proves too foreign and difficult for me.
Since I didn't notice a PSF request thread here, I resolved to just straight up create a new one in the hopes of finding some assistance, or someone interested and more knowledgable in PSF ripping, since I clearly lack the skills needed. The music data files from Digimon World 3 are here: http://www.mediafire.com/download/e3dh6w8xylxvt88/SOUND.rar
Hopefully the people who have been interested in finding a PSF set for Digimon World 3 read this, and collectively put it together.
As a side note, I suspect (and I told this to the original ripper) that the same method used to extract the music data from Digimon World 3 can also be used for Digimon World 2, which is a similar case of missing its PSF set plus people having problems digging through the game files. If anything shows up for that other game too, I'll post it in here as well.
Cool, there's people who are actually interested in these games! Guess I'm not alone. I ripped the first game (with the original driver) a little over a year ago, but I never did look into 2 or 3. I wrote some tools to deal with the VAB/SEQ files back then, maybe they'll work with these, too. I'll look into it.
Out of curiosity, what's the forum you're talking about?
Wow, I didn't expect to receie a reply this soon. I didn't also expect to see a reply from the dude who ripped Digimon World 1 as well (based), I feel a little giddy.
http://zenhax.com/viewtopic.php?t=2146
This is the forum in question.
Regarding what I could do with these files, I was able to extract .sep and .vh files from most of the .bin files in there. I figured out how to split the .sep files, but after that I had no idea what to do next with the multitude of .seq files, let alone the fact there were no .vb files as well.
...wow, that was insanely quick. Guess I'll at least tag them properly. Guess I'd also need to set proper loop points?
One thing I'm noticing is the lack of reverb: was this an intentional part of the ripping process, can it or should it be adjusted to mimic the in-game reverb effect?
Also, what would really imply a throughout testing process of these PSF files? Testing them on multiple and different PSF players, listening to them for a long time to find any sequence/sample errors or omissions? Besides the reverb issue, this seems pretty clean already.
Thank you so much, that was perhaps a faster response than I could've ever asked for. It'll probably take me more time tagging these files than it took you all to rip them lol
2 missing tracks: the game over theme, and the victory theme. The intro and credits themes variate between regional releases, and they're used in FMVs so they would have to be ripped as .XA files?? Also, highly debating if the enviromental tracks should also be tagged and timed, to be consistent with Nisto's DMW1 PSF set also containing the ambience tracks from that game...they're still inside the .rar, though.
All tracks timed (with some discrepancies, mind you, but still does the ol' 2 loop + 10 second fade), sound effects removed. Ambience tracks still not tagged, I'm edging towards tagging them as well: the most complete YouTube rip of the OST has tag information for most ambience tracks (missing 3 in comparison with PSF rip), which would greatly help identify them.
All that would need to be done, besides further revising the timing, is the reverb for each track, for which I kinda have some problems/opinions:
-My copy of the game plays songs at a increased tempo, for some reason.
-Some tracks have what I consider an accurate reverb right from the get go, while some don't. Namely, "Auction Theme" lacks some reverb, while "Main Lobby" sounds very close to its game counterpart...I suspect the game itself sets up a custom reverb effect based on certain locations (and thus, on certain tracks), which leads to some ripped tracks not having the in-game reverb effect. "Auction Theme" is used inside a cargo tower, so a reverb effect is expected...but 3 seconds of this track are reused for an specific jingle at the beginning of the game, and this jingle lacks the reverb effect.
I honestly looked a little bit into applying reverbs with PSF-o-Cycle, and the end result tracks sounded of worse quality to me. I got scared of fucking up the tracks, so I will refuse to tamper with reverbs for the moment.
On the subject of Digimon World 2, I am still expecting a reply from the DMW3 music data ripper for an explanation of the process he used to rip said data...I am still scratching my head around the fact he mentioned he got a "ROM dump" of the game...I don't believe there are ROM dumps for PS1 games, there are only ISO images.
--I programmed my driver so that the tempo may be adjusted to user specification... use PSF-o-Cycle for that.
--I intentionally keep Reverb OFF when creating PSF/sets. Same games use global Reverb, others are track specific, etc... again, you'll want to use something like PSF-o-Cycle to play around with these settings.
--Missing tracks? No clue. I ran a batch conversion to convert everything to PSF and I kept all the data. I could have made a typo somewhere, I'll check when I can.
--For testing, a simple playback using the latest and greatest plugin(s) from Kode54 should suffice. If not, you can always extract the EXE from a PSF and figure a way to boot it in actual Sony hardware if you're overtly worried about accuracy/etc.
--ISO and ROM are interchangeable words, given the context. Therefore, "ROM Dump" is equivalent to "ISO".
I'm glad that the rip was a success! Please, do enjoy! :)
When I was talking about tempo, I meant my copy of the PAL release of Digimon World 3 somehow plays back music at a faster tempo than normal on my PS2. The rips all have the correct tempo.
-I've been messing around with PSF-o-cycle, though I don't feel like I'd ever get track specific reverb just right. I'm glad with the current state of it.
-There's two songs missing, so maybe the original music data rip missed those songs, too?
-I just tested it on foobar, nothing out of the ordinary, so I guess it's gold.
-If that's the case, then whatever method that was used to inspect the ISO image let the original music data ripper to see more than pretty much everyone else that tried to look into the game before him.
Regarding Digimon World 2; does the "AAA" folder show up in your disk image software? IsoBuster detects it, but shows a red plus sign next to it, which, according to its docs: "It means that IsoBuster felt the need to compensate or alter what the drive returned to get to the data. E.g. CD-i discs are often not correctly recognized by CD/DVD-ROM drives and IsoBuster tries to compensate for that (possibly assumes tracks at certain locations) to be able to give access to the data". So I would guess that some less robust/compatible software probably wouldn't detect the folder at all. My rip matches the Redump database for SLUS-01193, which should be about the most accurate rip you could get. Anyway, that's where all the sound files are.
EDIT: This is getting interesting. I only found 28 songs on the US release. I searched the entire image for "pQES" in a hex editor since I couldn't find this track anywhere. But I just got my hands on the Japanese release, which has some files not present in the US release, in the root directory, called *.DRV. There's 51 sequenced tracks in the A.DRV file. And then there's also the CITY, DUNG, VS and COMM stuff, which are present on the US release also. Anyway, not sure if that track will be in the A.DRV file, or if it's just hiding in some compressed format, or a different audio format altogether or something, but I'll have to figure out this *.DRV format I guess.
EDIT2: Err, okay, so it looks like those are just the BGMs for Digimon World Digital Card Battle? Well, I have no idea where Chaos Tower and the few other tracks are hiding then... :S
That is precisely the reason why I'm still expecting a response from the Digimon World 3 music data ripper: these two games have their files hidden very well for some reason. I recall coincidentially reading up on another forum that some PS1 games tend to not follow the standard ISO rules, hide all the important files in a hidden partition that only the game's code refers to, and fill up the disc memory with DUMMY files.
How the DMW3 music data ripper got his hands on it, I still don't know. A program such as jpsxdec can list and display image and video files inside the game with no issues at all, but not all files.
EDIT: Now that you mentioned it, I recall seeing a ZZZ folder inside my disc image, not AAA.
Wow, now the three games' got some ground work for more tidy and official PSF sets. I'll have to admit, I am in no way familiar with Digimon World 2's soundtrack, so I can't tell if these rips are accurate to the game. The few tracks I am familiar with do sound accurate, though.
I am not familiar with 2 or 3 myself. :P I do own the Digimon World Digital Card Battle soundtrack though, so that's how I recognized the tracks in the A.DRV file.
by DavisOlivier at 5:10 PM EST on December 14, 2016
I got to mess with DW2 and i could make some psfs using Squaresoft74's directions, and as i noticed some songs were missing(Dungeons and Battle victory music), i tried splitting the .sep files, and i found out they were inside other songs, like the battle victory is inside the own battle .sep file. Maybe the DW3 missing songs are inside others too!
And sorry for the bad english~!
Digimon by lucasdiaskun at 4:17 PM EDT on July 12, 2020
you are excellent, I researched a lot on the internet in order to exchange the audio files of the DW3 game but without success, the intention came because this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb7O___f7Xc&list=PLdNxniPfi1KkquTJZs6b- HD4C5XDcFs1Y, simply remade the entire soundtrack of the game in a great quality, so I thought I could replace it, but during the research it became more and more difficult, I would like to know if you would be interested in replacing them.
Hi! I'm the guy who originally dumped Digimon World 3's BIN files. I recently decided to revisit the music. I have the PSF files that were already extracted but as said above, it seems that the victory and game over themes couldn't be found.
Somebody above mentioned that they found a BIN file with two sequences and it got me thinking. The BIN files in the COMMON folder (MPCOMMON.BIN and MVCOMMON.BIN) are quite a bit larger than the other BIN files. I wonder if this is where they might be.
EDIT: No, seems to be the game's sound effects. Will go back to the drawing board.
EDIT 2: The soundfont contains a ton of instruments too. So maybe something is in there?
As for how I got these files in the first place, I mentioned this over on ZenHax when I was asked years ago: my copy (Digimon World 2003) is the exact same as everybody else's: put it in the CD drive and all you see are dummy files. I had to download an ISO rip to find the music files.
edited 5:34 AM EST February 3, 2022
edited 5:35 AM EST February 3, 2022
Working with PSF, BIN and VAB by Lakster at 5:45 PM EDT on October 1, 2022
Hi everyone!
Would any of you please help me in person/live in a call with actually getting music from CD Mage folders which contain VABs, SSDs and BINs? I'd throw you a tip. I can't get around all this no matter how many times I read and cause bin2seq doesn't seem to start on my PC.
Please write to ante.lakos@hotmail.com or IG laki_sbk
If I can learn this, I will contribute to many many many games... Thank you so much!